McLuhan—Wherein the Effect for the Players Themselves is Lost

Marshall McLuhan
Understanding Media (1964)
MIT Press edition (1994)

Film is not really a single medium like song or the written word, but a collective art form with different individuals directing color, lighting, sound, acting, speaking. The press, radio, and TV, and the comics are also art forms dependent upon entire teams and hierarchies of skill in corporate action. Prior to the movies, the most obvious example of such corporate artistic action had occurred early in the industrialized world, with the large new symphony orchestras of the nineteenth century. Paradoxically, as industry went its ever more specialized fragmented course, it demanded more and more teamwork in sales and supplies. The symphony orchestra became a major expression of the ensuing power of such coordinated effort, though for the players themselves this effect was lost, both in the symphony and in industry.

(p. 292)

Accounting For Taste

Louis Chevalier
The Assassination of Paris (1977)
trans. David P. Jordan (1994)

In October 1957 six government ministers along with the cream of Paris society (as was correct) rode the metro to inaugurate the Franklin Roosevelt station which, according to an official speech, "was one of the most luxurious in the world, with its windows depicting famous paintings with cut-glass replicas." Less enthusiastically, some malcontents commented that the uglier things got above ground the more refined they became below. As the Champs-Elysées, with its shrunken sidewalks, began to resemble a used-car lot, the metro, in contrast, was made beautiful. They even considered having music in the station. It would have been installed if those responsible had been able to choose between classical music and pop, a serious problem that remains unresolved as I write these lines.

Picking Battles

How to reform musical academia while stopping short of outlawing aestheticism? Easy: greater institutional specialization.

The realization that a truly comprehensive musical education is no longer feasible should be accompanied by the realization that truly comprehensive orchestra programming is equally unfeasible for exactly the same reason. Instead, music schools must team up with other music schools, and orchestras with other orchestras, to create statewide and nationwide networks of institutions which collectively cover more ground more ably than any of them ever could individually. And it's not rocket science to see how the stylistic pie might begin to be divvied up: by local preference and tradition, by a school's extra-musical academic strengths, and, most trickily, as I will discuss shortly, by more extreme specialization based on big-picture affinities among seemingly disparate musical styles.

It makes sense for music schools at universities where technology looms large to lead the way in areas like complexism, electronic music composition, and music recording and production. Ditto for research science and music cognition. Ditto again for business school and arts administration. (Hand to heart, I'd personally rather that neither of those were taken seriously as academic subjects, but hey, just maybe today I could get through one blog post without attacking someone else's right to exist?)

The larger, older, established private schools like Northwestern and USC make sense as backward-looking art music conservatories, since they have the endowments, traditions, and locations to make it work. It doesn't really make sense for any other kind of school to be oriented in this way, however, and the small number of schools that are well-suited to it is probably about the right number that we really, truly need, don't you think?

Small out-of-the-way liberal arts schools, meanwhile, are bound to be more ideal places for navel-gazing composers, wooly-headed experimentalists, and angsty critical theorists to take their long walks in the woods and ever longer draws on their bongs.

Major research universities with multiple specialties and ever-shrinking state appropriations which are nonetheless charged with serving tens of thousands of students would be better served offering a hodge-podge of musical opportunities for the general student population to stay involved in music rather than cutting them off nearly completely from such opportunities in order to pour all of those resources into pre-professional training in musical traditions that don't exactly reflect that community's breadth of interests. (Okay, so I kind of gave away who I'm thinking of here.) Their faculties should be the most generalist and their accredited music degree-granting activities the smallest in scale and the most difficult to get admitted to. These music majors should be few enough in number to each be fully financially supported and afforded significant, meaningful teaching opportunities as undergraduates, thus allowing the schools to serve even more of their general student bodies. Obviously, under such circumstances, these music majors would be receiving generalist training themselves. Admission as a music major should be applied and auditioned for at the end of the student's sophomore year at the earliest, after they've had a chance to acclimate to college life, demonstrate some aptitude(or not), and figure out what they really want to specialize in. Because musical activities will be available to them from day one regardless of their major, they can take their time in figuring all of this out, as most of us wish we had been able to do. Upon admission, they should be granted four full years of study on top of whatever they've already had, leading to bachelor's and master's degrees.

•••••
Owing to the inertia of prestige, a lot of this has been happening somewhere, if not everywhere it should, for decades. The next step, strategic pairing of musical styles and specialties within these music departments, is equally crucial yet I suspect far less widely observable and probably bound to be unpopular with many. Here's what I mean:

It might ultimately prove that Indian classical music, for example, fits the structure and mandate of a rigorous jazz or classical music university-conservatory much more closely than that of a small liberal arts school where multiple non-Western traditions are studied quite a bit more casually than would traditionally be demanded of aspiring practitioners of Indian music.

Contemporary pop music and music technology obviously belong together, and that has already been happening.

The quarantining of the supposedly best-and-brightest classical music composers, theorists and historians in academically prestigious Ivy League-ish schools with few performers around to either keep them honest or do them an occasional solid has never made much sense to me, and I don't think I'm the only one; it seems obvious that the Brahms interpreters and the Brahms scholars (as well as the Webern interpreters and Webern scholars) would both be better served housed under the same roof, where they can drive each other crazy instead of the rest of us, and probably learn a lot of other important stuff from each other, too.

Improvisation could easily serve as a unifying principle in a specialized music department: jazz, pop, creative music, and heavily improvised, aural musical traditions from around the world could together comprise the exclusive focus. Imagine if there were just a few schools like this scattered around the country, where no one read music at all; then we could all stop fighting each other over this issue while trying to cohabit the same overextended institutions, and everyone could institute appropriate evaluative standards for their own students without having to make sacrifices to the demands of generalist musical accreditation.

And of course, what instrumentalist or singer hasn't dreamed of a music school free and clear from the meddling of the other group? Perhaps that species of institutional specialization is ultimately a bit too arbitrary and radical, but I still think it's an excellent example of the way we ought to be approaching this issue conceptually. You could rattle off x number of abstract ways this sort of insularity would be bad for the students and the student experience, but seriously, can anyone reading this who has been to music school honestly say they've never wished for it, or that it wouldn't have had major benefits for them?

•••••
I could go on, but I hope you see where I'm going with this. Most of this is perfectly conceivable in the abstract, but getting from here to there looks pretty much impossible. You would have to convince a lot of schools to shutter accredited degree-granting programs they already have, something almost no one is willing to do for just about any reason imaginable. Additionally, even if they were willing, someone has to blink first, and again, while certain local affinities can indeed be seen reflected in the identities of places like UCSD (nicknamed SCUD), Northwestern (classical Chicago), North Texas (baaaand), Mills (it's totally NorCal, man), every school in NYC (so killin' man) etc., etc., who is ever going to up and close down the other half of their department, lay off the other half of their faculty, hire seemingly redundant faculty in their place, and try to sell the rest of their immediate community on the notion of such a specialized focus? It seems impossible; but I think it's also inevitable and overdue. It simply is no longer possible for the flagship state school in every city, every state, even every region, to maintain an unspoken dominance of 19th Century orchestral performance while quarter-assing everything else just to look more pluralistic than they really are. And, it's no longer necessary! Why are we still doing it? If we could all be within a day's drive of a classical conservatory, a jazz/pop incubator, a world music hub, a scorched-earth modernist outpost, and a small, flat rock under which distanced scholarship is pursued, there would be no need for our local school to fake its way through all of those things at once...unless, of course, that was its mandate and there were only a few others like it in the country. We can always use a few. But only to work in tandem with the others.

Minneapolis Music "Scene" In Crisis: The Fickle Ears Pocket Guide to Donning Your Adult Trousers

When I began to seriously explore my options for leaving Minneapolis, it was not just because I had lived there my whole life, because I felt I had outgrown it, because I had become frustrated with a number of my projects, because I saw little hope of ever earning a respectable living there as a musician, because I felt the need to continue my formal education, or because I got sick of not being able to drive my car because it was literally frozen to the street. There was also a certain amount of writing on the proverbial wall in the form of venues closing or ceasing to host music, and an unmistakable downward trajectory in the interest I felt was being shown in my work. What had once seemed like the bad old days of post-college aimlessness and lessons learned the hard way ca. 2006-08 now appeared as the high point: throughout the mid-to-late 2000s, I had several late-night gigs a year at the Dakota while that series still hosted serious local bands, my teaching studio was steadily expanding, I auditioned my way onto the MN Orch sub list, I landed a 25-hour a week day job with good pay, health benefits, iron-clad scheduling, and no weird hours, and there seemed to be room to grow with most everything I was involved in.

By the time I was sending off grad school applications in the fall of 2010, I had realized that things were not just stagnating but in fact deteriorating. Emails to my contact at the Dakota, an old college friend, started going unanswered; bandmates with ins at other venues had similar trouble; personal relationships, both involving me and not involving me, became strained in a number of my projects. It was time to get the hell off this sinking ship.

The more recent sinkings of the Minnesota Orchestra and the Artists' Quarter make a rather incongruous pairing, except by timing, as well as in some ways by my own relationship to each of them: transformative early listening experiences, close mentorship relationships with members of their respective inner circles, avid participation in all the standard-issue minor-league kiddie shows, courtship of real adult involvement following my graduation from college and emergence into the professional world, and ultimately, after six years of that last step, zero to show for it. How, then, could I of all people possibly squeeze out something despairing, or even matter-of-fact, about the direction of the Twin Cities music scene in the wake of these two dinosaur institutions falling on the hardest of times? I have been proclaiming here for years a sort of Darwinist outlook on such institutions, which have a tendency to divert attention, resources, and butts-in-seats from the more out-of-the-way places where the music of our own time is hammered out. In that sense, I have to say obstinately that had I anticipated the downward spiral progressing quite so quickly, I may not have been so quick to leave town. The kind of work I'm interested in doing needs space, both literally and figuratively. Minneapolis in my heyday there offered neither kind; the city was too small and its institutions too big. It's not farfetched to wonder if a complete wasteland would have presented more opportunities than I had. If that's the way things are headed, color me equanimous.

The problem with this kind of anarcho-utopianism regarding the current situation is, of course, that the core audiences for the institutions under discussion are largely blind (deaf?) to the rest of the scene. They're more likely to disappear altogether than to take the initiative to find out what else has been going on this whole time. They need to know exactly what they're going to get in both musical product and social prestige before they make an appearance at an unfamiliar location, and there are more than a few parts of town which are non-starters from the outset. If anyone reading this back home takes offense to that evaluation, you have exactly one way to prove I'm wrong, and that's to become a seeker rather than a finder of live music. And to bring a friend. I double-dog dare you.

The vitality of a music scene cannot be measured by how many musicians comprise it, what kinds of music they play, how many venues they have to play at, how they compare ability-wise to musicians in other cities, or by measuring any of this per-capita, as Minneapolitans have the blithely irritating tendency to do whether or not it is relevant or constructive. Rather, the audience, that other 50% of the musical transaction, is more like 100% of the indication of a scene's vitality. It matters not whether that audience is comprised of other professional musicians or of people who just wandered in, just that its presence is, in fact, palpable in the air that is to be moved, its impact tangible on the musicians' morale, its proverbial butts firmly planted in all of those would-be empty seats, and it's five dollar bills deposited in hats, jars, and buckets of all manner in large enough quantities to, if not pay the bills, then at least warrant reporting on a federal tax return. And that's why Minneapolis, for all of its musical and extra-musical strong points, just plain stinks for some of us. When horseshit variety bands get called back year after year for the same good paying gigs, drawing raves from the patrons, it doesn't matter who has more of these bands; you just stink. When the same people play the same music at the same venue for the same audience for decades at a time, that presents another instance of stuff starting to smell funny. When the personality cults are built around musicians whose personalities and music alike don't seem to justify it, a foul odor begins to emanate from the "scene."

What, me bitter? It can't be at the institutions themselves, and it's certainly not at anyone I know. Just about everyone I know even haphazardly or once-removed came to hear me, often several times over. It's the people I only ever met in certain venues in certain parts of town when certain musicians were involved; they are the ones who, for obvious reasons, confound me. An overreaction you say? Not quite, if you believe this guy:

“I cut my salary to where there’s nothing left, and I still can’t make the numbers work,” Horst said. “I still have great nights here, but one great night a week doesn’t cut it. People say, ‘The place was packed when I was there.’ The problem is everyone is there on the same night.”

That many of the musical organizations I most wanted to work with could not afford to involve me in their plans is ultimately on the audience, not the organizations. Those organizations are not stupid, nor are the individuals who comprise them. They can't swing and miss six nights a week, and to them, I'm just another forkball in the dirt. I could only hang so many posters, send so many emails, run so many Facebook events, place on so many jazz calendars, do so many interviews, and go to so many horseshit amateur jam sessions without seeing much of a light at the end of a the tunnel before I just had to give up and go somewhere else.

So, Minneapolis, are you going to sit there and cry in your hotdish like a big blonde baby, or is it maybe time to wake up to all the "other" music you've been missing, to take inventory, notice what's missing, and get the hell to work on making it happen? You're not just going to let me go all petty on you in some stupid Nick-Payton-esque blog rant, right? You can't just let a prematurely washed-up malcontent like me be sooooo happy to have left you in my wake, can you? Don't make me proud, make me sorry! I triple-dog dare all y'all to live up to your own regional hype! Starting now! For better or worse, you have more space to do it now than you've had for quite a long time.

Evading The MN Orch Question

The fact that I have not addressed the Minnesota Orchestra situation here says pretty much exactly what I would say without all the trouble of sitting down to write. However, I thought I might share some related stories that ought to be part of the public record about me and my work, and which will inevitably lead to some elaboration upon that opening sentence.

Early in elementary school (I don't remember exactly when, but quite early indeed), principal trumpet Manny Laureano made a visit to my school to give a talk about Pictures at an Exhibition and play the ubiquitous excerpt a few times. I've long since forgotten the content of the talk, but the sound of his trumpet in that gymnasium is something I've never forgotten, even if I'm not so sure it ever informed my own playing or hastened my later inclination towards brass instruments.

My college tuba teacher Ross Tolbert was the long-time principal tubist with the group and used to positively shower us with complimentary tickets. I once ran into him on my way into a rare concert at the St. Paul Cathedral and he insisted on rustling up a free ticket for me. I owe the bulk of my in-person orchestral listening experience to Ross and the orchestra, who, thanks to Osmo's arrival, were really hitting their stride around this time.

To this day, the most glowing classical-music bonafide on my resume is making the finals of the 2005 WAMSO Competition, which is the Minnesota Orchestra's young artist competition. Unfortunately, the aspect of this that has stuck with me the most is the opportunity I didn't have thanks to some good old fashioned U of MN politicking. At this time in history the U of MN Symphony Orchestra played a yearly "side-by-side" concert with many MNOrch players, and as a graduating super-senior and WAMSO finalist, I fully expected to be assigned to it for the first time. Unfortunately for me, my relationship with our orchestra conductor had been fractured years earlier over my involvement with the jazz ensembles when those commitments (made literally a year in advance for a special collaboration with the dance school) came into conflict with an opera to which he had hastily assigned me. When my friend Mike Werner returned from the side-by-side rehearsal, he told me that a group of players from the orchestra who had served as judges for the competition had come over to congratulate him thinking he was me. I felt bad for him to have been put in that situation, but worse that I had missed a significant chance to make some important connections, or at the very least to soak up some praise from some high-level classical players the likes of which I'd never have so good an opportunity to impress again. There's no guarantee that anything substantive would have come of any such connections, but having been denied the mere opportunity out of petty musico-stylistic politicking is one of several grievances for which I'll never forgive my alma mater. The conductor, against whom a resignation petition was once circulated during a rehearsal, didn't last much longer, but in my case, the damage was already done.

In January 2007, I took a sub list audition for MN Orch and several weeks later received a short, generic letter stating that I had been placed on the list. I assume my name can still be found somewhere towards the bitter end of that list, though obviously it hardly matters. Because I had been purchasing bare-bones ticket packages to the SPCO around this time, I would frequently get calls from fundraisers, who would announce themselves as "so-and-so calling from the Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra." For about 3 seconds I would think it was a gig. Every time. It was miserable. Then again, MN Orch never even called me to ask for money.

I think I earned my way onto the list based on how I played that day, but in all honesty, the thought of performing with either of those groups did and still does frighten me just a bit. I've never known what to make of the fact that I'm the only U of MN tuba graduate I know who was never extended the invitation. I have tried to explain to jazz people many times that flashy bebop chops do not translate to orchestras of this quality, unless they exclusively play Berlioz, in which case I'm their man. I certainly don't have the right instrument to anchor a sizable orchestra by myself, though it is a supreme chamber orchestra axe, lying as it does right in the sweet spot between the big horn and the small horn as orchestra players tend to conceive of them. In other words, there is a role for me in orchestral music, but it's not the one that ever gets subbed out. Actually, I never once had a paying orchestra gig in Minnesota, not even as a ringer in a youth orchestra or anything like that. Conversely, within four months of moving to Southern California, I played two of them, two more than I'd had the rest of my life, without knowing anyone, handing out any business cards, or even having a Facebook page. I'm not sure if that says more about Southern California or the Twin Cities, but it didn't exactly make me sorry for leaving home.

As of today, everything floating around the blogosphere indicates that the Minnesota Orchestra is in dire jeopardy of ceasing to be the institution I knew it as, one which exposed me to the bulk of the live symphonic music I've experienced, and did so, especially after the arrival of Osmo, at an impeccably high level. This is something worth lamenting if it indeed comes to pass. It is, however, difficult for me to view these events in isolation, and in light of the larger national and international musical landscape, I am oddly ambivalent. I will say that I got sick and tired of seeing MN Orch players compete for and win McKnight Fellowships worth a fraction of their salaries while I and many freelance colleagues were passed over while grossing far less than the value of this grant in an entire year. I will also say that having my teaching methods called "crazy" by one MN Orch member with whom I shared a student was uncomfortable, if not entirely predictable. And though the ensemble has a wall full of ASCAP awards for adventurous programming, mainly that just makes it even harder to take the award seriously. Two of the very worst pieces of music I have ever heard in my life were token contemporary pieces on MN Orch programs, placeholder garbage by careerist hacks that, as many have pointed out, merely reinforce the traditionalist biases of rightly-suspicious blue-hairs.

There is now talk of would-be donors revising the Minnesota Orchestra out of their wills. I have yet to read an item detailing the fate for which all that money is now destined. It is without a doubt at this juncture a sum which could make some wonderful musical things happen in the Twin Cities if it were directed to the right places. The real questions, as always, are whether any such extra-institutional projects so much as smell like art to people with enough money to keep a will on file with their attorneys; indeed, whether these people have a nose for art at all, by any definition; and whether anyone at all in the Twin Cities would attend these performances if it meant they had to drive on surface streets, venture outside the Skyway system, or sit next to someone whose hair actually was dyed blue (you know, like in a hipster way).

So, I am ambivalent. I don't like to see people losing their jobs whether they are fellow musicians or not. I also would like to see the entire American orchestra world blown up and rebuilt into something functional and vital. Unfortunately, there's no reconciling those two things, and even more unfortunately, the former is always a much stronger likelihood than the latter. That's all I have to say about this for now. But do come back tomorrow.

On Writing It All Out

Trumpeter and blogger Stephen Haynes writes this of the late Bill Dixon:

"The landmark mid-sixties recording Intents and Purposes was primarily a through-composed/scored piece of music. 'At the time,' Dixon remarks, 'this was the only way to be sure to get what I wanted.' Just recently, Bill told me that if he knew then what he knows now he would have written a lot less. During the summer of 2007, in preparation for the work that became 17 Musicians in Search of a Sound: Darfur, Dixon produced over one hundred pages of material for the orchestra. As the dates of the rehearsal approached, he was faced with striking a delicate balance between the amount of calligraphic notation he had created and the modest amount of rehearsal time available. Bill did what he has done with increasing frequency in similar situations: he reduced the quantity of written material and concentrated, during rehearsal, on direct composition/ communication of intent."

When I read that someone of Bill Dixon's stature feels that "if he knew then what he knows now he would have written a lot less," I can't help but wonder about my own journey in the opposite direction, roughly from this (2004)

to this (2005)

to this (2012)

I further wonder if "the modest amount of rehearsal time available" isn't too often a greater mediating factor than strength of conception. There certainly is a fair amount of pressure exerted on developing composers to hone in on the essence of what they're after and excise the rest, to be practical first and imaginative second. I hasten to quote Professor Gann in lengthy dissent:

In his notation, Feldman rammed with his full force against one of the great sacred cows of the late 20th-century composing world: professionalism. Many, many composers today, and especially those who teach or who get orchestral performances, are obsessed with the notion of professionalism. The imparting of professionalism is how a composition professor justifies his or her position in academia alongside the more easily validated fields of the sciences and social sciences. And the essence of compositional professionalism is notation. Composers in academia, myself included, constantly harp on students to make their notation as simple and clear as possible, to line the notes up right, to avoid ambiguities and complexities that have no effect on the sound.

...in reality, efficiency is only appropriate to things that are ultimately unimportant. We want our garbage taken out efficiently, we want our drivers’ licenses renewed efficiently, but someone who advocated efficient child-rearing – eliciting maximum good behavior for a minimum of parental care – would be a beast. In the same way, Feldman’s notation drives home a principle that we forget at our peril: that, however necessary the evil may sometimes be, efficiency in the pursuit of music-making is no virtue.

To piggyback on these comments through the lens of Jazz and Creative Music, I would point first and foremost to the irony that charts which are more thoroughly notated are generally seen as less efficient means of working with creative musicians, who may or may not have the inclination, training or chops to deal with such material. In my humble opinion, we have collectively accepted this division of labor far too easily, both in Creative and Concert music, and in spite of all the complaining (and a little bit of praise) about the ways in which jazz has become more like European music, it seems to me that there was actually a much stronger incentive to read when this skill had a greater social significance (i.e. as a matter of pride and dignity among early African-American jazz musicians), as well as an economic one (big bands, after all, employed an entire generation of "Creative" musicians). I have even argued that when musicians today point to the Ellingtonian dictum that writing for particular people is a richer form of expression than writing for nameless, faceless abstractions, they actually are appealing, in part, to efficiency as a virtue in just the sense that Gann (rightly in my eyes) dismisses it.

Of course, those are fightin' words in the jazz world, because frankly, efficiency rules today's jazz world, and this should give us quite a bit more pause than it ever does, more than any supposed European influence, loss of "relevance" to youth culture, or any of that other bullshit. The reasons it doesn't are too fraught and numerous to explore here, but suffice it to say that my work has only come into greater conflict with these tenets of efficiency as it has evolved and that this is a significant source of alienation for me. So, when I read a statement like the one above, given, as statements to this effect almost always are, without adequate context or explanation, and at that, from a musician who was exceptionally capable of offering both, I can't help but bristle a little bit. (Blame the scourge of efficiency again, I suppose, for the lack of clarification, since the given passage appeared, of all places, in a liner note.)

My intent here is thus not at all to level criticism at Bill Dixon himself, who I have to assume had good reasons for working the way he did and, given the opportunity, was more than capable of explaining why. I simply want to insist that efficiency, virtuous or not, is relative, that we (musicians) exert willful control over it by the skills we choose to develop or neglect to develop, and that there's still far too much work which remains unrealized, marginalized, stigmatized due to a lack of players who are truly equally comfortable at all points along the notational-improvisational continuum. I'm certainly not arguing that we impose this on everyone through conservatory training; that would be the worst course of action. People should make good on what they want out of music, theirs' and others' alike, and if there just aren't very many Creative musicians who really truly want and need to work the way I work, fine. That's the front, but I've never believed it; not for a second.

It will always be more efficient to simply wind up the players and set them off doing Their Thing, but it only becomes clearer to me with time that this is not My Thing. I don't believe that composition is superior to improvisation, but I do believe that they yield different results and that this difference is not negligible. I think I can defend the bulk of what I write out in painstaking detail on the grounds that it could not be improvised, which means that efficiency is then beside the point in yet another sense. I've also worked happily and fruitfully with many, many other musicians who work in quite the opposite fashion, and intend to continue to do so. Variety is both the spice of life and a lot of work.

Toward a New Isolation (ii)

While the thought of making a vital and coherent unaccompanied musical statement doesn't scare me much when I'm part of a larger ensemble or program, the thought of sustaining it for an entire set (even a short one) can be terrifying. Whether a matter of real-time or suspended-time composition, the task becomes increasingly daunting as one's durational aspirations escalate. When composers speak of the challenges of "large-scale forms," they are likely referring not only to durational but also orchestrational scale, and, more importantly, to the relationship between the two. Depending on how it is deployed, the sonic variety afforded by large forces can add variety to a lengthy piece or obliterate the unity of a shorter one. An unaccompanied solo concert on a monophonic instrument is a similarly extreme case, pairing as it does maximum duration with minimum orchestration. This in large part explains the difficulty of such concerts for performer and audience alike, and similarly, the rarity with which this challenge is embraced and met by players of monophonic instruments.

In the previous post, I outlined several reasons why I've decided to undertake just such a project. Notably absent, you may have noticed, were any specific ways I intend to address this basic problem, nor did I claim anything resembling an abiding love of monophonic solo music. Solutions and affinities both will need to be discovered along the way, which for me is a foreign way of working (as is knowing from the outset that one or both could fail to materialize). One of my teachers asked whether I thought if x or y great musician had been a tuba player they could have pulled this off. Obviously, we'll never know, and it's better that way: for one thing, it's foolhardy to assume that any of the musicians whose names you might invoke in this capacity would have been equally well-suited to just any instrument or tradition; further, those of us who might otherwise be tempted to lament the fact that none of them were tuba players can take solace in knowing that there's still something experimental, Modernist, essential, dare I say new out there for us tubists to research and aspire to.

To be sure, this is a subtle and not a revolutionary newness, but I think it is palpable and worth mapping anyway. When your instrument has become a dubious luxury item, and not least for the very musical culture which spawned it, any questions that still need answering are important questions, and work that needs doing is important work. And at the risk of contradicting my obstinate aversion to allowing aesthetic factors to be mediated by social ones, I wholeheartedly admit that the more complete self-determination of the solo endeavor is, for the moment, by far its most attractive feature, certainly more so than any actual artistic vision I've yet managed to pin down. This is, after all, a kind of autonomy not typically granted to monophonic musicians, nor even truly considered available to us in many traditions; who knows, then, what kind of constructive havoc we might wreak on both the tradition and our own oeuvres by rightfully claiming it? The thought is exciting enough that I'm willing to temporarily compromise my absolutist tendencies in order to find out if this excitement is justified.

So, where to start? My first concentrated investigations have been conducted through the lens of improvisation. It had been clear to me for some time just from the extremely limited amount of noodling I had done in a few idle practice room moments that solo improvisation isn't something you just sit down and do, even if you're an experienced ensemble improvisor, for each presents unique challenges that the other does not. No sooner can I type that, though, than I become acutely aware that this statement marks me as something of a conservative in what tends to be an ultra-liberal landscape: there is after all in improvised music what at this point can only be called a tradition of learning on the job, as well as a thoroughly irreverent attitude toward Uptowner angst over compositional "problems" like that of orchestrational versus durational scale. Having worked extensively with militants from both ends of this spectrum, I've often found it to be a highly polarized one. I fancy myself something of a peacemaker on this front and have embraced certain aspects of each aesthetic, but I ultimately register somewhere on the center-right than straight down the middle. In any case, in solo performance, you can't just go along with what everyone else is doing, which means I'm finding out what I think about a few things that were only ever peripheral to my ensemble endeavors.

To start, it bears mentioning that I've come to strongly favor traditional techniques of tone production as foundations on which to expand, this following in part from the realization that subverting my classical training has proven far easier than the process of developing it. If I want an airy sound, I can play out of the side of my mouth, open a water key, set a tuning slide ajar, and on and on; if I want indeterminate microtonality, I can engage the fifth valve and play with the other four as I would normally. If this sounds suspiciously facile, perhaps it is: part of why I find these techniques more accessible than classical tone production is because my classical sound concept is exceedingly specific while the outcomes I'm seeking through these techniques are much vaguer and mostly defined negatively (i.e. in opposition to the "classical" ideal). These are, in fact, techniques which I've developed almost exclusively "on the job" while on stage with improvising ensembles and spent much less time "practicing" by myself. To be sure, the pursuit of very particular airy tones or off-kilter temperaments would entail much more work and undoubtedly prove much more elusive than I'm claiming my versions have. It does confound me, though, that despite my disproportionate investment in traditional technique, it remains a greater challenge.

Of course, more and more musicians from all across the musical spectrum are proclaiming an authentic dislike for the "refined" instrumental sounds of classical music. Oddly enough, it seems to me that the pop music people tend to be among the more intelligent and level-headed about this; in any case, it is intuitively clear even to me as a relatively uninitiated (and uninterested) listener why these sounds don't suit most mainstream pop and rock very well. I find the venomous anti-classical ravings of the improv world, supposedly founded on the principle that anything is possible, to be far more arbitrary and confounding. As best I can gather, there are two primary explanations (unsurprisingly, both are non-aesthetic and conjectural): one is the association of classical music with Europeanism, colonialism, oppression, The Dominant Ideology, and so on; the other is the assumption that classical training does as much to prevent non-classical possibilities as it does to enable classical ones. The first issue is far too treacherous to elaborate upon at the moment. I trust that if you have strong opinions on this that you know where to look for further enlightenment, and also that there is not here. The second issue, conversely, is something I've returned to again and again in this space and even so have no shame in returning to yet again, though I have a slightly more qualified response to offer in this particular case.

While the classical method of tone production remains my default setting, I can say with a reasonable degree of confidence that this reflects a choice I have made for myself rather than one that my teachers and training have made for me. I don't believe that the classical training I have had has either physically or conceptually closed me off from exploring a variety of alternative methods of tone production, even if my sparing use of these alternatives might innocently suggest the opposite. In fact, I often hesitate to apply phrases like "classically trained" to myself at all, since I was almost purely self-taught in the area of technique for the first four years I played brass, didn't have my first tuba lesson until the age of 15, and, as my teachers surely would tell you, have never fully assimilated the total package of standard orchestral brass methods. Even so, I did more or less adopt the sound ideal once it was presented to me in the standard way and have spent most of the last dozen years pursuing it, albeit through a hodge-podge of self-taught and standardized techniques.

If you insist, I suppose you're entitled to speculate that I merely accepted what I was being told by an authority and that I'm mired so deep in this subversion of my own identity as to have become unable to perceive the reality of the situation. We should all at least be willing to consider that possibility, and also considered qualified to dismiss it: it is far too easy an accusation for us to level at each other, not to mention for an outsider to level against an entire musical tradition in which they have no interest or investment. It is awfully presumptuous to reduce an individual's entire life experience to tidy packages like "classically trained" or "academically credentialed" based on limited observation. I would posit that we're all guilty of these kinds of snap judgments on a daily basis, appearing as they do to be simply a part of our human wiring. For my part, I don't consider myself to be either a pure autodidact or purely classically trained, and yet when in the company of one group, it is without fail the other factor by which I am most strongly identified, labeled and remembered.

I am certainly not disputing that classical music culture tends to be obstinately absolutist about tone production, for that it most certainly is; yet based on my own time in accredited classical music schools (something I've actually experienced that the woolliest improv heads have not), I do think that, ultimately, the seeming triumph of this absolutism speaks overwhelmingly to the tremendous poverty of imagination among these students, which itself ultimately speaks more to the unsustainable size and scope of contemporary accredited, degree-granting musical academia in the United States than it does to the pedagogy that prevails therein. There simply are not enough dedicated, inspired, self-motivated students with which to populate this voracious institution, and at the point when schools are growing enrollment simply to generate revenue, one can no longer make facile observations about the efficacy of their curricula by simply examining the end results. For the overwhelming majority of these students, there's no personal artistic necessity at work, nothing whatsoever compelling them to pursue some musical ideal which exists in its truest form only in their imagination; in other words, there is no voice here for advanced classical training to stifle. I did not always see it that way, especially regarding composition, but time and perspective have changed my views.

I myself was among the most suspicious and disillusioned of classical music majors, and often profoundly unhappy, but it was no more lost on me at the time than it is now that I was being presented an opportunity for a certain kind of growth which was important to the musical vision I was beginning to develop, and which I would have been a fool to turn my back on for fear of becoming a mindless technician or a servant of The Dominant Ideology. (Though I would, like all of us, claim to be among the worthier of music students, the fact that I jumped through every hoop in the mindless technician curriculum with room to spare and yet still can't touch the mindless technicians one encounters on the professional level speaks again to my point about over-enrollment.) The University of Minnesota was far from the ideal place for me; it may in fact have been the worst place in the world for me to go to music school. Even so, while it may have stifled me socially, I can't say that it stifled me musically. There certainly were opportunities I didn't have there that I could have had elsewhere, but the ones that did exist were no less relevant to my goals, and even my most resentful investments in them have continued to pay dividends.

The whole issue of classical training begetting conformity is in my view frequently mischaracterized in the most obstinate corners of the improv world, where, not coincidentally, first-hand, in-person observation of the people and institutions under discussion tends to be in notably short supply. In any case, the trope about virtuoso clones is, if not necessarily an inaccurate surface observation about the classical world, more or less equally applicable to the improv world, which has now been around long enough for us to observe a similarly high degree of uniformity and predictability among these musicians (at which I imagine their pioneering forerunners who are still alive can only cringe). There sure are an awful lot of self-proclaimed rugged individualist brass improvisors who all play flat on the fifth partial. This is not in any way to say that music which uses flat fifth partial tones is necessarily bad music, only that many of these players' lofty claims to negative freedom are overstated. Conformity, it turns out, is not so easily pinned solely on the Uptowners: it does not simply disappear in absence of the will to impose it, nor in the presence of the mere stated intent to escape it. Seriously, how many times have we all heard from improv detractors that "all that shit sounds the same" and had no way to respond aside from assuring them that what they just heard wasn't the real shit? This is not just a classical music or an improvised music issue.

You've probably heard the same stories I have about classical teachers forbidding their students to play jazz, especially early on in jazz's history; ironic, then, that a remarkably similar line of thought prevails today in certain improvised music circles regarding classical technique itself. It's too bad that we, collectively, have not yet managed to debunk this myth from either side of the divide, but that's probably because trained-monkeyism on the one hand and laziness on the other are as timeless and endemic to human civilization as music itself. This makes it appear as if pan-stylism is fiendishly difficult when in reality it is merely a matter of dedication and balance. Similarly, to believe that great hordes of latent musical visionaries are being stifled by academic dogmatism is so often merely a desperate attempt to reconcile an overly idealistic view of human creativity with a lack of tangible evidence to support it. Again, the actual problem, if it is one, is that there are not nearly this many visionaries available for today's vastly overgrown classical music academia to stifle. (Of course, I would be remiss not to mention this angle as well.) I do believe that there are better ways to train musicians, that there are methods which are predisposed to open stylistic doors without closing them, and that there is a certain concurrent depth of experience as both a listener and a player which will make this process not merely accessible but in fact inevitable. No one would like to see classical music academia embrace these methods more than I would, and that's because I've lived in it; by leveling criticism, I hope to redeem this music and these institutions, not condemn them. I'm awfully tired of people who know only a little bit about the products and nothing whatsoever about the process taking these perceived shortcomings as indictments of the entire classical music tradition, mere collateral damage in a voracious search for authoritative-sounding zingers with which to validate their own tastes.

I am not writing to argue for the inherent supremacy of the classical sound, but merely to declare my embrace of it as one possible acceptable sound in an improvised piece; indeed, as a sound which I freely choose to rely upon heavily even having developed a handful of alternatives, and in no way simply hewing to the intolerant classical tuba teacher I never had; and to locate that position in the current musico-philosophical landscape as I've experienced it anecdotally. If there is a rational justification for a player to seek refinement of their sound, it is that this represents one way to move beyond the lowest hanging technical fruit, and therefore, one hopes, to conform less, not more. Regardless of the particular sound in question, this kind of refinement presents an inherently steeper learning curve, certainly much steeper than one could hope to climb without substantial off-stage practice time. For this reason, I think that classical players actually tend to have access to the greatest variety of sounds; whether or not they choose to use them is a cultural question, not a technical one. And in the case of unaccompanied monophonic solo playing, I would take tonal variety as a fundamental value a priori, with timbre, which is far less important to me as a symphonic composer, taking on a heightened importance. I see most of the possible sounds brass instruments can make as accessible from a variety of points on the classical training continuum while the classical sound itself seems to be accessible only to those who have invested disproportionately in it. Your mileage may vary, but in my case, not even the obstinate autodidact part of me has failed to find rewards along the way.

Flavor of the (Final) Month

Year-end retrospectives are everywhere, and jazz critics in particular seem to love them some list making this time of year. It always gets me thinking: how many times have they actually spun each of these records? Did they audit them on $1000 speakers or in the car on the freeway? And how many other new releases have they spun this year? How many times? Where?

Musicians are prone to wondering these things when it comes to questions of critical authority, but I wonder also out of a bit of insecurity. I haven't acquired or listened to a single record that was released this calendar year. It's quite rare for me to do so any given year, and has been forever. Real or imagined professional obligation as a player, composer, teacher and thinker has compelled me to spend an awful lot of time catching up on things that happened before I was born, and only secondarily on staying "up to date" with the latest developments. Whether I'm winning the battle or not, this is slowly changing: I've acquired many more records released in the 2000's over the last couple of years than I did during the years they were actually released. There's plenty going on today that interests me; it's just so hard to find that it's easier to wait a while and see what people are still talking about at the end of next year. I've learned the hard way that it's safe, nay, essential to ignore flavors of the month during the month in question. That goes for the final month of the year as much as any other.

As for the authority question, I can't imagine putting out a list of my own even if I had done more work. I've found that I need 3 listens to settle on a general thumbs-up or thumbs-down. My opinion changes frequently before that point and almost never beyond it. But to rate a group of albums empirically against each other would require several more hearings of each. And of course, I'm not talking about listening in the car or while making dinner; the music needs to be the sole object of your attention if you're going to claim any authority whatsoever, even to yourself. (When I say "empirically," of course I don't mean "for everyone for all time," but I think that within your own aesthetic, you can certainly be clinical in going about this kind of thing. If you don't, you end up fooled.) This is not at all to say that you are not listening for pleasure or that you are otherwise contriving some foreign mode of perception; indeed, distracted listening is the most unfulfilling and foreign mode for me. I recommend the opposite.

So, have these critics sampled even several hundred of the several thousand new jazz records that have come out this year? Have they devoted ca. 5 hours of calm listening time to each? That's getting into the thousands of hours already, an average of 3-4 hours every single day of the year, and you figure at some point for work or play they will want to listen to something from last year or earlier as well. I doubt that all of these numbers are nearly this high, though one or two of them might be (just a hunch, but I suspect it's the total number of records that's high and the number of spins that's low). I think lists which are constructed with authority are entertaining and sometimes even highly informative, but I have to be suspicious of the year-enders. Even if the critics themselves are authorities, the task they've chosen is one which under present conditions simply cannot be achieved authoritatively.

Classical music is, of course, a different and much more difficult situation. Maybe I really am living in the dark, but I've long been struck by the differences between how jazz and classical musicians go about their business. I think classical music badly needs an "underground" scene. I think classically trained players need to stop taking as a given that it's only a matter of time before they land a $200,000 a year gig playing in a top 5 orchestra. I think they then need to be willing to get to work building something better without the promise of an immediate union scale paycheck. String quartets playing Metallica covers in a classical style for coffee shop yuppies is not "underground." Jazz, its precarious condition notwithstanding, still has an underground. There are still compelling jazz performances and records being made in places and by people that the NEA and the yuppie DINKs they survey can't wrap their heads around. Can you say that about classical music? I can't. I see the same slick coating as the jazz world without the underground bearings that have kept it alive in contravention of so many professional listmakers' dire predictions. And I see a clear and simple explanation for this in the petit bourgeois self-importance of so many classical musicians. Jazz players collectively are not perfect, they are not saints, and of course they are getting more bourgeois by the day and will surely have to face this issue soon enough, but right this minute, their tradition is alive because they go underground and eat ramen when they have to. Meanwhile, the classical brats are floating higher and away, sipping merlot in a hot air balloon that's on fire. So I applaud the jazz critics' for including in their year-end lists music that was actually created this year! That means someone thought to make it, found a way to realize it, and got it into their hands. We should try it, classical folk. Grab your flannel shirts and PBR and let's get the fuck down to business already.

The Aging Process

According to last night's program, the ensemble Zeitgeist , a local new music group which hosted my ensemble C.o.S.T. as part of their fall cabaret, is planning an "Early Music Festival" for next April. The featured composer is Henry Cowell (1867-1965). Though I generally have a low tolerance for hyperbole, I think the idea of labeling work from this era as "early music" in the year 2010 is not only brilliant, but also necessary, and I'm glad someone thought to do it.

To neglect most of the great living composers is one thing; to neglect most of the great music of an entire century is quite another. I wonder if advocacy for "living composers" as a group is one way the behemoth institutions at the top of the classical music food chain get away with continually abdicating their duty. As long as composers Cowell's age are wrongly categorized as "new" or "contemporary," orchestras will continue to point to their latest commissions to middlebrow careerists as evidence of a commitment to the ever expanding tradition, when the only things actually expanding are their noses. Kudos to Zeitgeist for calling them on it.

Hidden Tracks (i)

I often think about how the relative fortunes and career trajectories of musicians of different generations are affected by technology, and when I say this, I'm thinking purely in terms of their paths to "success," whether defined by themselves or someone else. Obviously, technology affects what we create, not just our success or failure in being recognized for it, and that's certainly a fertile area for discussion, but it's also worth pondering whether or not a musician is in the right place at the right time relative to technology, and how that affects, for lack of a better term, their business decisions.

I was born in 1982, started playing music around 1993, and consider myself to have gotten "serious" sometime in 1999. It's often difficult for me to distinguish what has actually changed since then from what I was simply ignorant of, but to my recollection, while record labels still meant something, everybody and their brother was already recording, producing and distributing their own discs back then, and it was obvious that sooner or later, having a CD out would cease to mean anything at all. When exactly that threshold was reached is probably impossible to determine; it probably happened at different times in different places, and may, in truth, have already happened most places by the time I even became aware of it. Suffice it to say, then, that I've always felt just a bit screwed over.

Whether or not that's justified is another story, for I've benefitted in innumerable ways (most importantly as a listener, I think) from the increased accessibility (lower case "a") of recorded music. It's no coincidence that my getting "serious" about music happened exactly when I started spending substantial portions of my time listening to music, but the cruelty of that scenario is that I was allowed to become enraptured with a world that was already dead and gone. Even though I've tried many times to accept that fact and move on, part of me will never forget the feeling of staring at the paltry stack of discs that comprised my collection circa 1999 and looking forward to the day when I could offer the world such a document of my own. Every one of those discs mattered to me, so the idea of making one myself seemed significant. Little did I know it was already too late.

So, my relationship to technology is a bit like the milk commercial where the guy arrives in what appears to be heaven (for those who haven't seen it: besides angels, there are brownies and chocolate chip cookies everywhere, but when he opens the fridge, the milk carton is empty, and he's left wondering where he actually is). Such is life as a musician who came of age during digital distribution's pre-natal stage, seduced by music when physical media still mattered, but unable to move others beyond casual resignation using the same format.

Truthfully, I could have jumped on the train just in the nick of time had I so chosen. There certainly were people my age and younger in 1999 who had discs of their own, and although it may already have meant next to nothing in the "real world," it certainly seemed pretty cool to other young people who didn't know any better. The problem with me was that I did know better. I largely resented these kids, first of all because their rich uncle had obviously bankrolled the project, and second because, though I had quite a ways to go myself, I could hear that their playing (and writing, in some cases) was not worthy of releasing a document.

I didn't want to be like that, and so it was something of a point of pride for me for a long time that I didn't have a disc. I wanted one, but I wanted it to be good, and seeing so many kids my age coming out with junk that they'd obviously be embarrassed about within the decade made me think twice. I'm glad I did, because anything I could have mustered back then would most certainly have had to be pulled of the shelves (err...servers?) in short order. I was quite self-righteous about this choice for a long time; it was the only way to console myself for being left completely in the dust, especially after it became obvious that people were tiling their bathrooms with these things, and that I'd passed on my only fleeting chance to make one that mattered to anyone at all.

The vestiges of that self-righteousness now have me thinking that this is just one of the many cases where I've been punished for doing the right thing. But was it the right thing? I saved myself some cash, and spared the few people who would have heard it the consternation that I felt for so many of their kids' recorded efforts. But in a sense, I was also fiddling while Rome burned. If I had the benefit of hindsight, I might have gone whole hog just to do my best to catch the twilight of the pre-digital age. It's a chance no one will ever have again.

I'm making it sound like I have an enduring fondness for physical media when that's not entirely the case. I've been dragging my feet a bit, but recently opened an iTunes account, and have purchased a few things that way. One thing holding me back is that I acquired more physical media over the last several years than I've been able to listen to, and so there's really no reason for me to start buying MP3's by the dozen (speaking of which, while the pricing is eminently reasonable, it is waaay too easy to spend a shitload of money on iTunes, so that has me being cautious also). The blossoming of digital distribution is just one part of the story: it's also cheaper and easier to record, edit, design and promote a record, and predictably, everyone is doing all of those things in copious amounts, hence saturating the market and people's attention spans along with it. So, I don't mean to get sentimental over the discs themselves; it's the particular conditions of the era they shaped (or perhaps my mistaken notions about it) that are more worth mourning.

More Inreach

Since the "Death of Music" discussion invariably intersects with the audience outreach and development discussion, here's a follow-up on the latter, which was actually in the works well before the former got me all riled up. Sometimes things just work out...

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It seems to me that form is generally thought to be the musico-technical area where the novice and the specialist differ most greatly, perhaps even on as basic a level as merely being aware of the concept of a structural "big picture" in the first place. As such, it has become the go-to topic for many an outreach activity. This is not to say that the words "form" or "structure" are necessarily used all that frequently in such cases; they may not be used at all, but nevertheless, the idea that the ability to identify structural landmarks is what separates people who "get it" from people who don't seems to hold sway with quite a few musical missionaries.

There are larger issues here which I've chosen to gloss over for now, such as how long it takes for such musico-technical training to meaningfully sink in, and whether or not it is, in fact, the key ingredient to engaging and retaining new listeners in the first place. In the interest of space, I would again refer readers to my previous post on the topic, where these issues are discussed a bit more thoroughly. For the moment, let's just assume that the answers to those last two questions are both affirmative; why, then, choose to focus on form, and what are the consequences of this choice?

I posited above that form represents the most severe disconnect between professional musicians and new listeners. Many academics would tell us that "moment-to-moment" listening is shallow and limited, representing the ultimate inability to see the forest for the trees. The integration, development, and transformation of themes that classical theorists and musicologists tend latch on to often occurs across many minutes or even hours of music. In their defense, it bears pointing out that hour-long instrumental pieces have ceased to be novel in classical music ever since Beethoven, who died almost two centuries ago. Even so, such large-scale structural awareness remains a foreign concept to listeners with a history of nearly exclusive exposure to shorter musical forms. These shorter forms most certainly deal in variation and repetition as well, but the overall temporal units are significantly smaller and material is typically repeated much more literally.

As for explaining why certain people gravitate towards certain music, the nature-versus-nurture discussion is endlessly intriguing, but I don't think it lends itself particularly well to reverse engineering for the purpose of proselytizing for new audiences. I sense that it's neither practical nor desirable to attempt to gain control over listeners with the goal of achieving a specific outcome, and that there will always be numerous exceptions to any rule one might be tempted to establish. I do think it's safe to say that even listeners who bear an innate predisposition for structural contemplation will never experience it if they never have the opportunity, and hence that if nothing else, there's certainly good work to be done in the realm of take-it-or-leave-it exposure. I also think it's crucial to establish that structural awareness is not anathema to moment-to-moment listening, but in fact encompasses it; that they are not different things, but that one is a necessary precondition to the other; and that those who believe in the primacy of "the big picture" ought not forget this.

Moment-to-moment listening may be limited; it may gloss over the greatest accomplishments of many great musicians; and its predominance over structural listening among novice classical and jazz listeners may in fact be a direct consequence of an overly pervasive pop music aesthetic; but its primacy to the listening experience is undeniable and its influence is inescapable, whether in professional musicologists, rank amateur musicians, or the most musically naive among us. If the moment-to-moment sounds of a piece turn us off, then the whole piece turns us off. It's that simple. In absence of an attraction to what is commonly called music's "surface," mere "appreciation" (what an awful term) of the structure and development of a piece is not merely worthless, but I would think downright impossible.

While new music detractors love to accuse their enemies of exactly this pose, I've always had my doubts as to whether this is actually the case, there or anywhere else. I don't believe that atonal music is incapable of having an attractive surface simply by virtue of being atonal, and I certainly don't believe that anyone who claims such an attraction to atonal music is necessarily posing. But most importantly, I also don't believe that we can expect those for whom the surface of any particular piece is not attractive to simply ignore it and focus exclusively on structural elements instead. That's asking way too much.

You can dance around the surface all you want, but you can't make people ignore it. No one can ignore it, and they shouldn't ignore it anyway for crying out loud. That's just silly. One comes to care about (or even bother to think about) form only after the surface has drawn them in, but this process is one which can't be meddled with, forcibly drilled in, or lectured into behaving properly. Some may find it more plausible that structural listening could be taught, and that is undoubtedly how form has become the centerpiece of so many outreach activities, but even so, that's putting the cart before the horse. It's a sham, and neither an honest nor an effective way of addressing a shortage of butts in seats.

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While I've been using atonality as an example to this point, what got me writing this post in the first place was actually not atonal music at all, but rather jazz music. While classical musicologists certainly love them some large-scale tonality, I think that jazz musicians are even more prone to agonize over form when it comes to outreach than are classical people. The forms that jazz was built on are popular music forms, and hence, it is that much more agonizing for a jazz musician to be told by a pop-literate audience member after a performance that they have no idea what the hell just happened. That this happens all the time should tell us something about the respective roles of structural and surface listening. It should also leave us looking in, not out, for a solution.

There is, indeed, some common ground to work with here if our goal is merely to explain what, in fact, did just happen structurally and how it's not all that different from what happens elsewhere. Here as always, though, the problem with dealing so heavily in larger temporal units is that one sells short moment-to-moment sound and continuity. Form may ultimately prove to be important or even essential in creating a lasting relationship with the music, but there are so many other things that can turn off a listener long before they even have a chance to become meaningfully aware of it. I'm not nitpicking about audiophile subtleties, either; I'm talking about things as basic as instruments being too loud or too soft, or people who dislike the sound of a particular timbre or harmony.

Like it or not, these moment-to-moment concerns are make-or-break concerns, but I don't believe for a second that the solution is for listeners to ignore them in favor of ungrounded structural contemplation, nor is it for musicians to merely pander to the lowest common denominator. To the contrary, I believe that mere exposure is more powerful than proselytizing, and that our goal as musicians should not be to convince as many people as possible to tolerate us, but to reach the particular people (however few of them there are) for whom our music is enough by itself, without marketing, proselytizing or peer pressure. I also have come to believe through experience that sharing a performance with these listeners is eminently more fulfilling and enjoyable than the alternative, no matter how few of them there are.

As musicians, it is as important to respect the informed judgments of listeners who reject our work as it is to seek out those to whom it appeals. As such, I believe that the way to reach new listeners is not to subsume one's voice in the most marketable styles, but to invest the necessary time and effort to consummate this voice on its own terms. In short, what I'm saying is that rather than doing music different, we ought to do music better, reaching in, not out, for a solution. Big of me to issue such a challenge, since I could certainly work harder and play better myself, but I want to hone in on one particular facet of jazz performance that we could all stand to do better at, though, unfortunately, it's too often out of our control.

Generalizations are always dangerous, but I've come to believe (long before writing this) that "clarity" is an excellent catch-all term for what distinguishes great jazz performances from the rest of them. Furthermore, I would hypothesize that performances which fail to attain a high degree of so-called "clarity" don't stand a chance in hell of engaging the uninitiated listener (nor an experienced one for that matter). I would propose that instead of wasting our time reaching out by lecturing people about bridges and turnarounds, perhaps we should reach in and make it our single-minded goal to achieve an ideal level of "clarity" in our jazz performances.

What do I mean by clarity? Many things, but first and foremost, it's an acoustical matter. There are exceedingly few rooms that truly suit jazz's acoustic identity, and even fewer competent engineers capable of achieving truly balanced and clear live sound in them. Of course, balance and clarity are primary technical concerns of any musician or ensemble worth their salt, but these battles are hard won and the deck can too easily be stacked against us. Just ask symphony orchestras, who not only spend countless hours fine tuning balance issues, but typically have spent eight- or nine-figure sums of money designing and constructing their own performance spaces with the input of multiple eminent world experts on acoustics. Not surprising when one considers that issues of "clarity" or "transparency" can make or break the careers and reputations of their music directors; suffice it to say that if the same were true in jazz, there would be a lot of broken careers out there.

In jazz, the string players don't come in 10-packs (thank god), the percussion are not in the very back of a large hall, and the very directional winds and brass are not always able or willing to point in the right direction, yet the traditional small jazz group has at least one member of each of these instrumental families represented, and along with them, a built-in acoustical nightmare. The rare ensemble which has taken the time and trouble to achieve a clear acoustic balance in their rehearsal space will likely find the venues at which they perform to be both drastically different acoustically, and, in the form of their proprietors, drastically less willing to accommodate an acoustic performance in the first place, hence taking matters of balance and clarity out of the hands of trained and experienced musicians and putting them in the hands of whichever bartender happens to be doing sound that night. Eight- or nine-figure sums of money would indeed solve the problem, but that's a pipe dream for all but a select few jazz organizations, and even those for whom it is a reality seem strangely content to continue performing in concert halls that were designed specifically for symphony orchestras.

While acoustical clarity is paramount in any musical performance, the element of my broad concept of "clarity" that more directly relates to the above discussion about audience outreach in jazz is that of structural clarity, and specifically, I believe, harmonic clarity. I'm not unaware of the pitfalls of putting such a concept on a pedestal: there are styles of jazz I enjoy immensely where it simply isn't a concern, as well as plenty of performances which strive to attain it, fail miserably, yet somehow are effective in some other way. I'm not trashing people who can't or won't play changes by way of a conscious artistic choice, I'm just trying to relate the concept of clarity to the audience outreach activities I'm aware of in the jazz area, which typically deal with the common practice "mainstream" bebop and post-bop styles of the 1940's, 50's and 60's. Within that very narrow stylistic area, I have no reservations whatsoever about saying that harmonic clarity is what separates the men from the boys.

So, giving the benefit of the doubt for just a second to those who advocate for form-centric audience outreach, let's establish that harmonic clarity is an absolute precondition for a jazz listening experience that is more structural and less moment-to-moment. This is not to say that the changes need be played the same way every time, just that the structure of the tune is clear at all times. Performances by eminent jazz musicians who purposely obliterate the original changes usually achieve far greater clarity than those by novice musicians who are just trying to "get through" the tune by playing it the same way every time. In the right hands, the three A sections of an improvisation over an AABA structure each have their own character, and I have several times walked into a performance in progress and known immediately not only which tune was being played but which A section I was hearing. That says something about me, too, a fact which advocates of musico-technical outreach would be quick to point out; but it also says something about the band, for as I'm sure may of you reading this can relate to, I have also gotten hopelessly lost in the form on many occasions, both listening and playing, while in the company of incompetent players performing material I know upside down and backwards.

Performing jazz is not about merely "following" the abstract structure, but rather about listening and reacting to those around you. That's why on the rare occasion that an eminent jazz musician drops an A section, the band stays together and sounds good doing it, and why when a student musician drops an A section, the other students in the band get lost immediately and everything falls apart. I am by no means convinced that our goal in reaching out to new listeners ought to be to teach them to experience the performance like a player, but if it is, then let's establish that merely drilling them on how to keep track of A's and B's doesn't qualify as such a thing in the first place.

Two musicians came to mind immediately when I started thinking about the clarity issue, and they are both pianists: Fred Hersch and Kenny Barron. If I were leading a new listener recruitment effort, these two would be my go-to guys when it came time to play records for the group. In my mind, their playing is as close to the ideal embodiment of "clarity" in bebop and post-bop jazz as I've ever heard, not just harmonically, but also technically and structurally. Their playing, compositions and arrangements are not only accessible but downright catchy on a moment-to-moment level as well. As for other instruments, my horn section dream team would be Terrell Stafford, Vincent Herring and Conrad Herwig. Dave Holland and Tain Watts would fill out the rhythm section.

Of course, you're not going to get this band together tomorrow and start running out to high school auditoriums in rural Minnesota, and even if you could, we all know that with musical ensembles, the whole is not always equal to the sum of its parts. I made the list for two reasons: first, to try to give the reader an idea of what exactly I meant by "clarity," and second, to make the point that when it comes to audience development, it's not worth bothering unless we put our best foot forward. We all know that outreach is inextricably linked with grant funding, and that many grants either require it as a precondition to the project, or offer additional funding above and beyond the initial award if the recipient adds it to their plan. What this means, though, is that most of the time, it's not the Clarity Dream Team providing the music, but rather some other team of grant funded musicians whose success in securing funding may or may not correspond to their musical abilities.

I'm not trashing anyone who's ever had a grant. There are a gazillion musicians out there who fall somewhere in between competent and brilliant, and that's sufficient for most purposes most of the time. Nonetheless, if the band, the room, and the soundperson alike can't deliver the musical goods to the newbies, it's a waste of time from an outreach perspective, and we'd be better served to go practice until this is no longer the case. That many musicians rely on this funding is unfortunate, a fact which lays bare my greatest reservation about the concept of outreach: the uncomfortable balance of selfless and selfish motivations that it requires. Human beings are generally too inherently selfish to strike this pose effectively, and hence, I feel that directing our efforts in rather than out is both the most productive and honest approach when it comes time to present our music to someone for the first time.

Old Folks

The classical music people have been on about the aging audience issue for years. They've identified formality as the enemy, and hence, the solution they've pursued has been to try to make the concert experience more casual. How curious, then, that the audience for jazz is aging even faster, so precipitously fast, in fact, as to suggest that there have been hardly any newcomers at all in the last 6 years.

To state the obvious, jazz concerts are typically far more casual than classical concerts. If the jazz audience is actually aging faster than the classical audience, is formality really the villain here? You could argue that, on average, jazz performances have, for a variety of reasons, almost certainly become more formal over the last couple of decades, but certainly not to the point where you can't find jazz in a casual setting. For better or worse, the bar gigs have always been there, and even in a place like the Twin Cities, you usually have several to choose from on any given night. I don't know what the solution is, or even if there is or ought to be one, but if liquor, dart boards, and pull-tabs haven't worked in jazz's favor, then I wouldn't expect popcorn and hula hoops to do much more for classical music.

Interestingly, this study also provides fodder for dispensing with the idea that participation equates directly to attendance, since the percentage of adults who reported performing classical music actually rose substantially from 2002 to 2008 while the rate of attendance at classical concerts continued to decline.

Just Call Us "Other"

You can't make this stuff up...

From the Department of Poorly Written Program Notes, co-presented with the Department of Inadvertently Displayed Ignorance, and with promotional consideration provided by the Department of Midwestern Artsy-Fartsy Cuteness, I give you the blurb on George Benjamin's At First Light from the SPCO's "Program at a Glance," the condensed program notes that accompany the regular length program notes so that people who kind of care but kind of don't can learn something about the noise that is about to be foisted on them without taking too much time away from coughing and whispering to each other about how much they hate new music:


GEORGE BENJAMIN
At First Light

This piece, written when Benjamin was 22, was inspired by Turner's painting Norham Castle, Sunrise, an early precursor to impressionism. The music is itself a pastiche of gestures and abstractions. Fourteen musicians play more than 30 colorful instruments, including a bass trombone, whip, and a large newspaper.


Where to start? The appeal to age-based novelty is hardly uncommon, nor is the use of the term "gesture" as a backhanded compliment to a piece of new music, nor is the gratuitous use of an adjective such as "colorful" to distract listeners from the dissonance they're about to encounter. The crown jewel of this blurb, however, is the implication that the bass trombone is on par for novelty with a whip. A whip?!

It's true, I'm a low brass player myself, and hence a but biased, maybe even more than a bit insecure about our always tenuous status as "standard" members of the orchestra. That point aside, to categorize the bass trombone as novel is one thing, but to lump it in with whips and newspapers is completely absurd and ignorant. Not that I have anything against whips and newspapers (or rocks or sirens or bowed crotales...actually, I do have something against bowed crotales, but that story will have to wait for another time) being used as musical instruments, but I don't think its a stretch to say that the bass trombone has historically played a more significant role in the orchestra than they have.

In larger orchestras, the instrument is quite standardly used as the 3rd trombone, even if "bass" trombone was not specified by the composer. In case those of you who write program notes haven't ever actually been down to a concert since people got audacious enough to start sticking valves on trombones some several decades ago, this is because it sounds pretty damn close to a tenor trombone most of the time, and sounds even better in the lower registers by virtue of its larger bore, this despite being pitched in the same key as the tenor.

When one refers to a bass tuba, people are often curious as to how and why anyone would make a tuba that was even lower than normal, not realizing, of course, that the tubas they've seen and heard were, in most cases, contrabass tubas, and that bass tubas are actually smaller, not larger, than the instruments they're most familiar with. I suspect that, although the bass trombone is, in fact, larger than the the more commonly encountered tenor, the same dynamic is on display here, namely that the modifier is what catches people's attention first, along with the expectation that a bass version of an already low-pitched and heavily caricatured instrument must be something to behold. When this comes up in conversation with an avowed novice, I'm always happy to offer clarification, along with a good-natured, self-depricating low brass joke to help the medicine go down. When I read something like this in program notes supplied by a first-rate professional orchestra, the good-naturedness takes a hike. Writing program notes ought to consist of more than merely scanning the instrumentation for novelties, but when it must, a good handle on what exactly constitutes novelty in the first place is a must.

The poetic justice here? The trombonist played the entire part on his tenor (or, strictly speaking, "tenor-bass" trombone, a tenor trombone with one valve which lowers the pitch a perfect fourth, or less if the slide is out further at the time). Sorry, folks, you didn't get to hear bass trombone after all. If it's any consolation, at least you got to hear a nearly identical sound coming out of a nearly identical instrument, and at least the piece was actually written by a 22 year-old, albeit a 22 year-old who is now nearly 50. As for my consolation, I, probably alone, got to have a good chuckle at the status (or lack thereof) enjoyed by those of us who blow into big metal things that no one can name. It's not the first time, and I suspect it won't be the last.

Typecasting

The danger early on for me was being typecast as a percussion composer. I wrote a couple of little percussion pieces when I was still a student that began to get played a lot and are still played a lot, but I then realized that everyone was thinking of me as "Oh, he writes great percussion music." And so I purposely have said no for many, many years to any percussion ensemble request because I just don't want to be thought of as just that.

-Composer Christopher Rouse on Typecasting

I read those words several months ago and gave a cursory thought to those composers (including, I suspect, many "tuba composers") who have, in fact, not merely fallen into but actively cultivated such a typecast reputation as a way of ensuring performances and exposure from sources (like tuba players) eager to have anything they can get their hands on in the way of new music (note lower case). As a composer who could use some performances and exposure myself, I also had to snicker at the idea of turning down a commission of any kind, although I suppose it's more understandable from someone like Rouse who has had a great amount of success.

What only recently occurred to me, and hence reminded me of ths article, is that in my determination to prove the viability of the tuba in jazz, I have willingly contributed to my own typecasting as a jazz specialist. While this has no doubt yielded a smattering of success in this particular area, I've recently realized that the reason I have no opportunities whatsoever to perform classical music is that I haven't been trying real hard to find them. Viewing things in contrast to my jazz experience, where I've always been the outsider, it once seemed safe to assume that since my instrument was already a "standard" part of the orchestra, making things happen on the classical side would be easier. What I've since realized is that working without institutional support poses many of the same challenges to a classical musicians as a jazz musician, and that the time has come to apply the jazz model to my classical endeavors.

Since I first began playing professional (read: paying) gigs as a teen, a good 95% of those gigs have been non-classical. These have been mostly "money gigs," usually involving doing something not so near and dear to my heart, like being part of an ad hoc dixie-pep band for a football-themed US Bank regional conference. It's not easy to find a gig of any kind (let alone a paying one) playing my own music, yet "jazz" of almost any kind seems to be tolerated by quite a few bars and restaurants as peripherally related to the rock and pop that they normally host. This imputed similarity seems to me to be impossible without the counterweight of classical music dragging the stylistic center of gravity so far to the other side: what I do and what these venues normally host could not possibly be considered similar at all without there being something so dissimilar from both of them, something so demonized both aesthetically and socially in these circles, lurking out there beyond the pale. If you show up with a drum set, that's usually enough; show up with a stack of charts and music stands and refuse to go through the PA, and you start to draw negative attention to yourself.

For the last several years, my emphasis on playing jazz has led me to table any serious searching for alternative venues for concert music (an issue of great importance to me, if not only in theory) simply because this imputed similarity ensures that I at least have the option of performing at the established venues, if only infrequently, and this, being the path of least resistance, is the one I've taken. I do, however, take offense to the afore mentioned dynamic that makes this possible; I also have higher aspirations than to play in bars for the rest of my life, no matter what kind of music it is. Seeing that such venues likely wouldn't tolerate a "classical" presentation (though I look forward to duping them into it at some point just to see what happens), a renewed dedication to performing "classical" music necessitates a renewed search for appropriate places to present it, and (equally difficult) people to perform it with.

Though things are far from peachy in the Minneapolis jazz scene, there is at least a small network of accomplished players devoted to writing and performing their own music, as well as resurrecting works of the occasional forgotten genius, and making a good faith effort to find or make opportunities to present this work publicly. I can't say the same about classical music: the mention of getting a chamber group together to operate along these lines has been met more than once with, "When you have a [paying] gig lined up, let me know." The brass quintet in particular seems to be viewed by many as simply a cash cow project for the church and wedding circuits (for the record, if I ever get married, I want the Milo Fine Free Jazz Ensemble to play). The possibility that 5 brass players might "start a band" as an outlet for their own creativity rather than a business venture seems to be a remote one in these parts.

As an alternative to Greg Sandow's extolling of pop culture and Drew McManus' extolling of tuba players (flattered as we are, he obviously hasn't seen our dark side) as providing models for reforming the attitudes and presentation of classical music, I would humbly suggest that classical musicians look to the jazz world for a better model of vitality and viability. It's true, the saying goes that the best way to make a million dollars playing jazz is to start with 2 million; I'm not talking about money here. Money can do you-know-what with itself. I'm still waiting to meet classical players who put the realization of their artistic vision ahead of getting paid for playing their instrument any way they can. Certainly, there are plenty of non-classical players who fall into this trap as well, but there also seem to be enough high-minded ones to make up the difference.

To overcome this, I've decided that maybe I have to undo some of the typecasting that I've worked so hard to establish. Obviously, the idea, via Rouse, of refusing to play jazz anymore doesn't appeal to me at all (if Rouse really loved writing for percussion, he wouldn't/couldn't have refused commissions to do it). Instead, I've resolved to attempt to import just a little bit of the selfless devotion to art that is, in my limited experience, on display more often in jazz circles than classical ones. Once I'm typecast as someone who can't be typecast, I'll know I've succeeded.

Zander @ TED

As further evidence that if classical music is dying it may well be at the hands of its own advocates and practitioners, I give you this lecture from the TED conference by Benjamin Zander, who commits therein what are, in my mind, three of the deadliest sins of classical music proselytizing: attempting to use analysis to synthesize experience, arbitrarily imposing a narrative on a piece of abstract instrumental music, and appealing to novelty in place of substance. I'll examine them one by one:

(1) Attempting To Use Analysis To Synthesize Experience

Much of the talk seems to be preparatory in nature, getting the audience ready for the final, complete performance of the piece under discussion at which time they are expected to suddenly "get it" by virtue of their recently acquired experience. Zander ensures that they hear the piece (or at least fragments of it) several times throughout the course of the talk, a worthwhile effort as repeated hearings of the same piece heighten the experience for many listeners. Unfortunately, when Schoenberg wrote that in order to like a piece one must first be able to remember it, he wasn't talking about 10 minutes ago; more like ten months or years. The mechanism by which memory becomes an asset rather than a liability to the listener takes longer and cannot be synthesized quickly. It also cannot be done by simply telling people what they're supposed to be listening for. Describing music verbally cannot possibly give the recipient any idea what it actually sounds like, but more importantly, one should never expect that every audience member would describe it the same way were they asked to do so themselves. Analysis cannot stand in for experience because the latter is unique and personal. It cannot be formed on one's behalf by someone else simply rhapsodizing on a piece's structure.

Zander avoids the pitfall of imposing an overly technical analysis on what one must assume is an audience that lacks an academic musical background, but what he performs is analysis nonetheless, taking elements of the piece out of time and explaining "what's really going on." When it comes to the aesthetic experience, educating listeners into conformity in this way is impossible, but even if it were possible, it would not be desirable. There is a certain biodiversity that makes the musical ecosystem run, exemplified by creative musicians who draw on a wide range of influences, as well as certain strains of pedagogical tradition that encourage this (it's no coincidence that the terms "inbreeding," "incestuousness," and "cannibalization" are often used figuratively in this way by musicians, including those steeped in the classical tradition).

(2) Arbitrarily Imposing a Narrative on a Piece of Abstract Instrumental Music

This favorite pastime of Musicologists everywhere is no more useful in outreach than it is in scholarship. On a personal level, I make no bones about the fact that I have absolutely no interest in engaging in this pursuit, and that doing so detracts from rather than enriches the experience for me. Nevertheless, I think there are some more objective critiques to be made here. One could argue that prescribing a narrative for the audience robs them of the opportunity to form their own, the latter option being, I would think, the preferred outcome for those who enjoy such activities. One could also assume that even if the technique is wildly successful here, there's no guarantee (in fact, it's rather unlikely) that anyone in this audience will be able to reproduce the same results in themselves when confronted with an unfamiliar piece in absence of Mr. Zander's coaching.

I would go even further and argue that Zander does more harm than good here. To tell a roomful of novices that the key to listening to music is coming up with the right story to accompany it is to tell them that the art of music is weak, dependent, intellectually murky, and aesthetically frail; it is to trivialize the art form as one which cannot stand on its own, painting its greatest exponents as mere taunters and its greatest works as somehow incomplete; and it does the greatest of all disservices to those composers who actively oppose(d) this attitude and its consequences for their work. To repeat this blasphemy in front of an impressionable audience is to sell out one's own art form as a mere component part of some grander scheme. Conversely, the greatest gift one can give such an audience is the experience of music as an autonomous art form; music at its most powerful, unencumbered, and aesthetically unique, the way every musician, academic, and listener who has ever been inspired on a spiritual level by a piece of music has experienced it at one time or another in their lives. This experience is absolutely for everybody; anything less sells the audience and the art form dreadfully short.

(3) Appealing to Novelty In Place of Substance

That the TED conference specializes in "infotainment" is no secret, nor is it anything to be ashamed of assuming that both the info- and the -tainment are adequately represented. In this case, however, I see a classic case of sheer entertainment value diverting attention from the fact that next to nothing has actually been accomplished. Novelty is everywhere in this presentation: the white tennis shoes paired with a sport coat, the theatrical manner, and the elementary school bathroom humor form the bulk of it (the phrase "one buttock playing" sets the presenter up for a ruthless parody about "half-assing" it, but we'll save that for later). Zander can't help it that he's enough of a musician to perform his own musical examples, or that he has a foreign accent, but these novel features only contribute further.

Of course, whether there is in fact any "substance" to what Zander is saying here depends on your opinion of his methods. Some people believe that the problem with instrumental music is that there's nothing more to latch on to but the sound itself; I, on the other hand, see that as its greatest attribute. Some people believe that listening to music is a skill that must be taught and learned in an objective and quantifiable way; I happen to think that individual human beings are too different for this ever to be effective, and that even if it were, it would rob us of our individuality. Despite the romanticized folklore about divine inspiration that surrounds many great classical composers, we know from experience that the lifeblood of musical creativity is the unique impression the same piece of music might make on each listener, this being the mechanism by which stylistically diverse musicians often cite common influences. As musicians, our individuality is all that we have, and its expression is intractably mediated by how we see (or in this case hear) the world around us. Take that away and the party is over.

You might label my position that of an "aesthetic libertarian." I believe that if one's favorite music is not very popular, giving a lecture about why it is so great is neither an effective nor a valid way of attempting to improve its standing. Standardizing our perception means standardizing our art, both in creation and reception. I don't want that, you don't want that, and I have a hard time believing that Mr. Zander wants that either. He has had an experience and he wants dearly to replicate that experience in others, which is exactly how most of us feel about whatever music it is we are passionate about. Unfortunately, there's nothing we can actually do to make this happen, and among all the methods yet devised of attempting such a thing (lecture-recitals for captive dinner guests, making mix tapes for friends, etc.), the Saving Classical Music Proselytizing Tour '08 is the one I find the most misguided. Rather than making a mix tape and sending you on your way to draw your own conclusions, imagine that friend of yours putting on a dog and pony show aimed at revealing once and for all why what he/she likes is actually the best. Chances are your response would fall somewhere between boredom and resentment, no matter how well-groomed the dogs and ponies are.

In the middle of a conference where cutting edge ideas about neuroscience, innate human violence, and space colonization are being tossed around left and right, a funny little man dancing around in white tennis shoes and playing the piano is going to go over well no matter what. It's a good way to take a break from the more apocalyptically-themed presentations and increase the audience's intellectual street cred at the same time (listening to classical music is one thing, but to "love and understand" it earns even more points). Meanwhile, in the presentation's second life here in the online world, classical musicians everywhere are thrilled to see their medium occupying such a central place at a conference otherwise devoted to such "serious" topics, since this undoubtedly proves that what they do is important regardless of how well they do it (see the overgrown comments section to the video, where the gallery dutifully repeats a litany of pop culture clichés and fallacies about music that would make Greg Sandow blush). It's a symbiotic relationship if there ever was one, a quid pro quo, tit-for-tat, rigor-for-glamour, info-for-tainment type of deal. It's not surprising, then, that the talk gets a reception from both worlds something like President Bush gets from FOX News; it is, however, earned in exactly the same way.

Some may see in this talk a harmless, lightweight attempt to have some fun with an often unappreciated art form, a pursuit that has many benefits if it succeeds and few drawbacks if it fails. I see in it all the worst things that everyday folk like to accuse classical music of being: bourgeois, conformist, and elitist. It's not for nothing that classical musicians have had this latter term tossed at them with impunity by just about everyone else. As a group, we appear to others to have made our minds up that if everyone else doesn't just love what we do, there must be something wrong with them. Letting people make their own minds up apparently being bad for business, we'd seemingly rather make their minds up for them, as in, "It's not really an experiment because I know the outcome," or, "The other thing I want to do is to tell you about you." If the problem is that lots of people are turned off by classical music, I'd say that with this talk, Mr. Zander has become part of the very problem he seeks to address, leaving his audience as weaker listeners than they were before, and leaving those in the trenches with little to draw upon the next time the e-word is trotted out.